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Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub

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Re: Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub

#161

Post by cjbgkagh »

phillipcarter wrote: post #150
cjbgkagh wrote: post #102

Former MSFTy, don’t bother wasting your time giving feedback. Nobody cares, those that cared left. Microsoft has a weird culture, very top down, very passive aggressive between departments. For a brief while I would diligently prepare bugs for the dog food software. I would even walk over to visit people responsible for it and chat about it. Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole…

> Former MSFTy, don’t bother wasting your time giving feedback. Nobody cares, those that cared left. What you're describing does not comport with my experience there. Personally, I ensured that every issue filed on GitHub was triaged (read, replied if necessary, de-duped if necessary, labeled appropriately, assigned a severity/priority) and that all feedback items from the Visual Studio feedback system that applied t…

Hi Phillip, you are a very unusual PM in a very unusual group that is able to derive a lot of value from user feedback who are usually very technical experts. I'm not sure how much your personal experience generalizes. Same could be said for my experience I guess so that is a fair point. I definitely had a bad time at a bad group. In the Steves era there were a lot of bad groups. I predate your tenure by quite a bit but I do keep in touch with former colleagues and exert soft influence to get the things I need built. I also think there is a selection criteria bias on the type of PM to be on HackerNews. Why does it happen to be you posting here out of such a large company. Also I thought you left - I would have counted you as one of the ones who cared leaving? I know others who also care haven't left but I think it's safe to say that on average they care less. You will be missed. You also started at MSFT right? I think you're taking things from Microsoft on face value that perhaps you shouldn't be.

Re: Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub

#162

Post by gkop »

KindDragon wrote: post #138
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero but bounce by exhausting the very people eying time help them. The open-source equivalent of this behaviour is "stale bots" that close or lock issues with no activity. Or "moving discussion to a separate tracker", with all bugs gett…

Agree, but forever open issues doesn’t give any value too. Because you don’t know if this issue still applicable for latest version of app/library. I think stalled issue should be closed, especially minor one.

It’s the opposite. The older the bug, the less likely it will be fixed. Those old bugs are one of the most reliable sources of information how the software behaves.

Re: Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub

#163

Post by howdydoo »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #137
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero but bounce by exhausting the very people eying time help them. The open-source equivalent of this behaviour is "stale bots" that close or lock issues with no activity. Or "moving discussion to a separate tracker", with all bugs gett…

Those bots drive me insane; it punishes the most helpful the most. I would much rather they leave it open. I often find myself digging around closed issues to find people with similar problems.

Has anyone made a bot yet to automatically reply to stalebot so issues aren't closed?

Re: Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub

#164

Post by phillipcarter »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #161
phillipcarter wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Former MSFTy, don’t bother wasting your time giving feedback. Nobody cares, those that cared left. What you're describing does not comport with my experience there. Personally, I ensured that every issue filed on GitHub was triaged (read, replied if necessary, de-duped if necessary, labeled appropriately, assigned a severity/priority) and that all feedback items from the Visual Studio feedback system that applied t…

Hi Phillip, you are a very unusual PM in a very unusual group that is able to derive a lot of value from user feedback who are usually very technical experts. I'm not sure how much your personal experience generalizes. Same could be said for my experience I guess so that is a fair point. I definitely had a bad time at a bad group. In the Steves era there were a lot of bad groups. I predate your tenure by quite a bit…

Eh, not too unusual! Not everyone is the same, but the care factor is high for my previous peers, most of whom are still there. I can also appreciate that for consumer tech things are different. There is a higher degree of "it just needs to work" because it's unlikely the average user can articulate what's wrong, and they shouldn't need to anyways.

One thing I'll say is that it really does feel like the worst decisions about software there were made during the Steve Ballmer era. In my case, trying to keep compatibility with absolutely insane software behavior where it tries to do way more than it reasonably should made up the bulk of my toil and issues customers had.

A former coworker described to me that it was a very different time then. People believed they were the best engineers in the world, building software nobody else could make. In some small cases maybe that was true, but generally it was not. The combination of arrogance and willingness to try to bolt on as many capabilities and unbound extensibility features as possible led to a severe problem for people (sometimes the same people!) later on in life. It's actually been cool seeing how that complexity was methodically tamed. But it also makes me fear for any future company where a similar level of arrogance is practiced.

Re: Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub

#165

Post by EMM_386 »

howdydoo wrote: post #163
cjbgkagh wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those bots drive me insane; it punishes the most helpful the most. I would much rather they leave it open. I often find myself digging around closed issues to find people with similar problems.

Has anyone made a bot yet to automatically reply to stalebot so issues aren't closed?

> Has anyone made a bot yet to automatically reply to stalebot so issues aren't closed?

stalebots serve a purpose but they can be extremely annoying also.

I literally have 10+ issues bookmarked on Github I have to keep responding on to prevent the stalebots from wiping the issue out.

They are all issues affecting my software, and I don't want them closed by a bot just because nobody has gotten around to fixing them.

Maybe I should just go in there and submit a PR, if only I could find the time.

Re: Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub

#166

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

VRay wrote: post #152
userbinator wrote: post #14

I once even spotted a Microsoft employee who took the time to raise their concerns on the public tracker: That is just incredibly exasperating to see. When even MS employees are being forced to "bend over and take it", you'd think there would be some sort of "find the people responsible for this shitshow in the Windows team inside MS, and keep emailing them to fix it" protest. That one employee he noticed seemed to h…

Internally, Microsoft is chock full of super pissed-off people. Everyone's pissed at everyone else, since everyone there is constantly bombarded by angry friends' and relatives' complaints. A decade under Ballmer of firing anyone who wasn't good enough at weaseling ("unregretted attrition") has resulted in a company full of people who literally don't work at all 90% of the time. The company does an insane amount of s…

From an outside Windows user and admin perspective, I find it weird to blame Balmer here. I recall the era under Balmer as one where Microsoft made a lot of stupid moves, sure, but they were generally still pretty responsive to user feedback and I distinctly recall receiving our paid support on SQL issues from actual Microsoft-employed SQL engineers. Today all our paid support issues seem to go through clueless third party companies, and Microsoft very much seems to actively despise Windows users.

Re: Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub

#167

Post by zamalek »

matsemann wrote: post #64

> W11 taskbar is missing several key pieces of functionality which have incentivised new users to get into Feedback Hub and cast votes. By far the biggest and most controversial submission is about having multiple documents open in the same app. Actually the same reason for me to give feedback during W11 beta. Liked the beta as it gave me access to WSLg, but the productivity loss of the taskbar being useless made me…

> Mac

We have to use Macs at my new job, for compliance reasons. What a shitshow of UX. How on earth is anyone supposed to know to use snowflake-click to switch between app instances? That isn't "strictly [better] than Win 11" (per the article), because at least the method in Win 11 is discoverable (there's also the well behaving alt+tab, and win-number). You have to use snowflake-C + snowflake-V, unlike every other OS in existence. This not only screws with muscle memory, but it's genuinely uncomfortable for such a common action (especially on their keyboard).

Windows 10 was the peak. After that, Microsoft seems to have joined Apple's race to the bottom. The Linux desktop is the last bastion of sanity.

Re: Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub

#168

Post by pid-1 »

als0 wrote: post #61
pid-1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I distro hop with my home laptops and use Windows at $JOB I've decided to install Windows 11 preview around June 2021 and have been using it ever since, so I could eventually help my coworkers, validate our workflows etc... I am curious on why people in HN dislike Win 11 so much. For me the upgrade was basically about minor UI changes, which I got used to in 1-2 weeks. I am a sysadmin / cloud whatever and it broke no…

People hate Windows 11 because Microsoft have decided that most hardware, including many powerful workstations, are not eligible to upgrade.

I will have to agree that's by far the most legit reason to hate Win 11.

Re: Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub

#169

Post by mavhc »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #149
mavhc wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one cares about the desktop any more, and linux won the mobile race, in some fashion.

Linux did not win the mobile race in any sense that matters.

Should have said Is it the year of GNU/Linux on the desktop, d'oh

Re: Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub

#170

Post by tremon »

b112 wrote: post #73
thombles wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(author here) IMO KDE is the most authentic expression of Windows XP-era UI productivity that exists today. Their dedication to user-configurable settings is an absolute blessing.

To me, TDE ... a fork of KDE2, is even more so this. A very active community, too, and so far, no real change. I don't want change, managing my windows, my open programs, is a decades old solved problem. I don't want the new sexy, the flashy this and that. I don't want new styles, changing methods to interact. My Window Manager is not something I want to notice, or spent 10 seconds on.. for the next 20 years. It need…

Trinity is a fork of KDE3.
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